Let me tell you, never lie on your roommate personality test especially if you are not comfortable with every sort of person. Myself with my social anxiety and fear of unknown people thought it was perfect to pretend to be someone I am not and I created a persona via the questionnaire that reflected someone quite the opposite of me. While I wanted to find someone, who would be a party girl and take me out of my shell, I found someone who was completely incompatible with me and was disrespectful to our room and my privacy. This, folks, is my roommate from hell.
The beginning of the semester was fine, if fine is letting her “friend” over who was quite possibly twenty-five to thirty years old and had the stamina of a colt. Yes, on the day after move-in day my roommate already sent me the infamous text asking when I would be back to the room. I was almost in the door to the lobby when I was forced to turn around, swallow my pride and saunter off to the student center to wait it out. I thought that this was what college was, giving space to people when they needed it and then being granted the same luxury when the time came for my own alone time.
Unfortunately, I was not greeted with the same hospitality. She would stay in the room all day blasting loud rap and watching Netflix all day without headphones. By night, I was finally alone, but only because she went out to any party she could find with her friends. Then she would bust into the door around two or three a.m. and make noise until she slumped onto the bed and snored loudly.
I was a mess by midterms. With lack of sleep I was beginning to go insane from her being with me. She would sneak people through the window since our gate was broken because she ran out of guest swipes in the first month. One night, she made a grand entrance through the window herself when she lost her keys and the police and her were having a delightful conversation in the middle of the night through the screen.
To top off the entire escapade, she decided to buy a hamster. Since I had fostered this romanticized version of my roommate over time in response to the mental stress she had put me through, I thought it would be a grand idea. I thought this would pull us closer together, creating a bond between us since we now had something to take care of. Little did I know that hamsters are nocturnal animals that also love to exert their energy by running on a plastic wheel that needs a little oiling. I have very sensitive ears, and I cannot sleep when I hear noises. So, cue the many sleepless nights where I would lie awake in and jam my headphones further into my ears try to cast out that incessant whirring from my mind. Of course, the music only made me lose more sleep but anything was better than that annoying noise. Fun fact to add, they don’t like being held either.
It is a common rule for dorms to ban animals, so when the week of inspections came, she hid the hamsters behind her clothes in her paranoid state for the duration of the day, not knowing when Res Life was going to come. This did a number on both of the animals; one hamster went virtually insane and ran anxiously on the wheel every minute it was awake. The other was slowly descending into this hollowed out creature. Eventually the one hamster died and that stressed out the other to the brink of over-exercising and hiding every other moment of the day.
What was the sense of even having the hamsters if they were too scared to be held and ran away from my roommate’s hand and just ran on the wheel all night?
It didn’t matter anyway because I suddenly lost my temper. Each night when my roommate left I would violently untwist the wheel from the cage or put it a little too high for it to climb on. I, myself, descended into this insane state where I lost my humanity and gained this sociopathic self that laughed when I saw it couldn’t reach.
I felt the anger growing in me. Every day I vowed that I was not going to take it anymore but my anxious self was still fighting the sociopath inside me. On the last day of classes, I finally mustered up the energy to tell my roommate how I felt.
Taking in a deep breath, I unlocked our door and found both my roommate and her mother packing her things up. I thought that they were just over zealous with the winter break temporary move out. My roommate exclaimed this awe when I entered and told me that she was not going to come back. She didn’t want to say anything yet because she was afraid, and I quote, that she “didn’t want me to get some random weirdo.” It was too late for a roommate to be in my room.
While I may not be the best role model for situations like this, what you should take away is that you should never settle. I let my roommate walk all over me and take advantage of my generosity. I was lucky that she hated the school, her grades, and the “boring” community so much that she moved out, but this won’t always be the case. If you want to get a hamster, do not. Don’t. It will be running all night and be such a nuisance it is not worth it. Just get a fish, they won’t make noise.
Also, just follow the rules guys, and always be yourself. There’s a reason those questions are based on your personality.